Gainesville Daily Register (Gainesville, Tex.), Vol. 128, No. 42, Ed. 1 Friday, October 27, 2017 Page: 4 of 10
This newspaper is part of the collection entitled: Gainesville Register and was provided to The Portal to Texas History by the Cooke County Library.
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4 - FRIDAY, OCTOBER 27 2017
GAINESVILLE DAILY REGISTER
Opinion
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Headlines from an administration not putting America first
Ann Coulter
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Got an opinion?
June Sherrill, Gainesville
YOUR ELECTED OFFICIALS
FIRST AMENDMENT: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or
prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right
of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Fax: 202-225-3486 http://thornberry.
house.gov
Gainesville Mayor
Jim Goldsworthy
Gainesville City Hall, 200 S. Rusk,
Gainesville, TX 76240, 940-665-7777
President
Donald Trump
The White House, 1600 Pennsylvania
Ave., Washington, D.C. 20500
www.whitehouse.gov/contact
U.S. Senator
John Cornyn
517 Hart Senate Office Bldg.,
Steve and Cokie Roberts can be contacted by email at stevecokie@gmail.
com.
Texas Governor
Greg Abbott
P.O. Box 12428, Austin, TX 78711
512-463-2000, http://gov.texas.gov
State Representative
Drew Springer
Send your letter to the editor to editor@
gainesvilleregister.com. All letters are
subject to editing for clarity and length.
One letter per writer will be published in
the same week. All letters must contain a
physical address and daytime phone
number. Only names and hometown will
be published.
Vice President
Mike Pence
Executive Office Building, Washington,
D.C. 20501
vice_president@whitehouse.gov
Washington, D.C. 20510,
Main: 202-224-2934
Fax: 202-228-2856
www.cornyn.senate.gov
U.S. Senator
Ted Cruz
404 Russell, Washington,
D.C. 20510, Main: 202-224-5922
Fax: 202-228-3398 www.cruz.senate.gov
U.S. Representative
Mac M. Thornberry
2525 Kell Blvd., Wichita Falls, TX, 76308
Main: 202-225-3706
Thank you for road shoulders
Hallelujah! It seems Texas DOT is in progress of applying
shoulders to California Street.
I keep asking myself is this really happening?
I have begged and pleaded for years for this to take place.
Now, hopefully, our pedestrians and bicyclists can travel to and
from school a little safer.
Thankyou.
State Senator
Craig Estes
P.O. Box 12068, Capitol Station
Austin, TX 78711, (512) 463-0130
Cooke County Judge
Jason Brinkley
Cooke County Courthouse, Gainesville,
TX, 76240, 940-668-5435,
jason.brinkley@co.cooke.tx.us
P.O. Box 2910, Austin, TX 78769
512-463-0526,
Gainesville: 940-580-1770
www.house.state.tx.us/ members/
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sleep at night, worrying about the Syrians and that island
claimed by China.
What do the Angel Moms, whose kids were murdered by
illegal aliens, think when reading these bulletins:
“As Trump’s Peacemaker, Kushner Finds Common Goals,
and Friction, in Mideast Trip”
“Trump Won’t Move U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, Yet”
Well, we didn’t get the wall, but thank God it’s pedal-to-the-
metal on resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict!
At the end of Trump’s term in office, I promise you, the
Israelis and Palestinians will not be living in peace and
harmony. Kim Jong-un will not have called for democratic
elections. ISIS, al-Shabaab, al-Qaida and the Muslim head-
choppers du jour will not have suddenly become pro-life.
The rest of the world will still be a godforsaken
aK cesspool.
T That’s why Trump’s campaign slogan to “MAKE
\ AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!” was such a hit. Beyond
g the self-evident attractiveness of a president caring
about us, instead of the rest of the world, fixing our
country is at least something that’s achievable.
Our tender ministrations in Iraq, Afghanistan and
200 other countries Congress is unaware we’ve even
sent troops to has accomplished nothing good, and
all too often a lot that’s bad.
We haven’t been able to get our leaders to focus on
America’s problems for 30 years. The seduction of foreign
policy is too great. War, military strikes, treaties — if you’re
president, these are the antidote to whatever ails you!
Presidents wear the mantle of national security like an amulet.
Any international conflict means a president can’t be
criticized abroad. His short-term poll numbers will go sky-
high. Even a dunderhead can feel like a master strategist when
threatening to deploy the full force of the U.S. military. (See
Nikki Haley.)
The rest of the world’s problems will never be solved, but it
seems so adult and serious to be “working” on them.
We need to go into the Situation Room, sir. The Democratic
Republic of Noos Noos has sent a disturbing cable.
Yes, absolutely! Cancel the rest of my day that I was going
to spend fulfilling my campaign promises.
If ever there was a presidential candidate who seemed
immune to the siren song of “foreign policy,” we thought it
was Trump. We voted for a reality TV star. We didn’t want
“gravitas.”
Instead, the smart set’s contempt for Trump seems to have
sent him headlong into a fevered obsession with the goings-on
in North Korea, China, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Guam,
Venezuela, Afghanistan, Syria, Iran, Qatar, Niger and little
Burkina Faso.
No one cares enough to read past the headlines. There
won’t be any snippy lower court judges issuing frame-worthy
rebukes of Trump’s travel ban or thousands of women
showing up on the National Mall in pussyhats.
So there’s peace.
But there will be no change. Not in the rest of the world and
not in the country Trump promised to make great again.
Has Trump
learned anything?
Does Donald Trump have any interest in governing
the country? Has he learned anything at all about the
legislative process as he’s flailed and failed his way through
his first months in office?
Now he faces a critical test that will provide some
answers. Senators from both parties have crafted a truly
bipartisan bill to shore up the shaky insurance markets
created by Obamacare. Conservatives are trying to
sabotage the effort by demanding concessions Democrats
can never accept.
Will Trump support something that can actually pass?
Or will he cave in to the hard-right segment of his party
that automatically opposes anything that resembles a
reasonable compromise?
So far he’s been all over the lot, encouraging the
bipartisan negotiators and then demeaning their efforts
as a “bailout” of the insurance companies. In politics,
not keeping your word is the surest path to irrelevance,
and Trump’s irresponsible behavior led the Washington
Post to report, “Lawmakers in both parties consider him
an untrustworthy, chronically inconsistent and easily
distracted negotiator.”
Trump is deeply committed to
pleasing his core supporters, who
comprise about one-third of the
electorate. But being president is a
lot more complicated than being a
candidate. Sen. Charles Schumer,
the Democratic leader, was
correct in saying, “This president
cannot govern if, whenever the
hard right frightens him and says ‘Jump,’ he says, ‘How
high?”’
The arguments in favor of the bipartisan health care bill
are compelling. Trump has canceled government payments
that subsidize premiums for low-income policyholders. The
bill would restore those payments. Sen. Lamar Alexander,
the lead Republican author, warns that without legislative
action, “there will be chaos in this country and millions of
Americans will be hurt.”
Those “millions of Americans” include a lot of
Republicans, and Alexander accused the bill’s opponents
of putting ideology ahead of reality. “What’s conservative
about unaffordable premiums?” he asked on the Senate
floor.
The answer is “nothing,” which is why four Republican
governors signed a bipartisan letter urging passage of
the compromise measure. The letter quoted a warning
from the Congressional Budget Office that the president’s
actions “would increase premiums by 25 percent by 2020,”
and add nearly $200 billion to the national debt.
“As governors,” they wrote, “we deal with the real-life
impacts of actions taken in Washington, D.C.” But that’s
exactly what Trump refuses to do: deal with “real-life
impacts” instead of embracing baseless prejudices.
His argument that premium subsidies, which are
mandated by law, would simply enrich insurance
companies is an article of faith in conservative circles. But
it’s not supported by the facts.
The Washington Post investigated Trump’s claim and
found that instead of making money by participating in
Obamacare, insurance companies were taking a financial
beating. The Post accused Trump of “misleading rhetoric”
and awarded him Four Pinocchios, its highest level of
dishonesty.
Virtually the entire health care industry backs the
compromise bill, and so does the general public. A recent
Economist/YouGov poll found that 52 percent want to
revive the subsides cut by Trump, while only 21 percent
oppose restoration.
There’s a larger point here. The compromise bill is an
important experiment in bipartisanship, co-sponsored
by a dozen senators from each party who “negotiated in
good faith,” as the governors’ letter noted, and produced a
measure that involved concessions from both sides.
Republicans agreed to retain the basic architecture
of Obamacare. Democrats agreed to give states more
flexibility in implementing a system that needs a lot of
fixing.
Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, the lead Democratic
negotiator, argued that the bill could set a useful precedent
for future legislation. “It sends a powerful message,” she
said, “that when members of Congress decide to get past
our talking points and take a few steps out of our partisan
corners, there is a lot we can agree on and a lot we can get
done.”
That’s absolutely true. But the spirit of trust and good
faith that makes open-minded negotiations possible is
practically extinct in Washington today.
As Sen. John McCain, who has a long record of working
with the rival party, said recently, “We’ve been spinning
our wheels on too many important issues, because we keep
trying to find a way to win without help from across the
aisle.”
Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, says he’ll
bring the bipartisan bill up for a vote if President Trump
promises to sign it.
Will Trump be smart enough to do that? Or will he
continue to spin his wheels and squander his presidency?
We are now nearly a quarter of the way through the entire
Trump presidency — and, depending how the 2018 elections
go, we could be at the halfway mark.
Here are some headlines from that presidency:
“Defying Turkey, U.S. Decides to Arm Kurds in Syria”
“Iraqi Leader, in Washington, Gets Trump’s Assurance of
U.S. Support”
“Trump Administration Lifts Sanctions on Sudan, Citing
Progress”
“Trump Plans Visit to Asia to Buttress Korea Policy”
There are thousands of ‘em, day after monotonous day.
In the last 10 months, has a single manufacturing job been
created in Trump’s America? Has there been one opioid death
avoided? Has 1 foot of the wall been built?
No, just more of this:
“Trump Praises Philippine President in Call
Transcript”
“Trump’s Attempt to End the Saudi-Qatar
Stalemate Ends in Recriminations”
Democrats realize that Trump’s main campaign
issues, immigration and trade, were kryptonite to
his opponents. The Democrats, the media, even
Republicans threw everything they had at Trump —
a Russian dossier intended to sway the election, an
illegally obtained hot-mic tape, 100 percent negative
news coverage for 15 straight months.
He still won.
Democrats know how Trump did it — and, unfortunately,
they also know how to use the same kryptonite against him.
You will notice that smart liberals are NOT saying, We need
more pussyhats, more angry rhetoric, more Rachel Maddow
conspiracy theories! No, the smart liberals are begging
Democrats to steal the central components of Trump’s death-
defying campaign: immigration and manufacturing.
Andrew Sullivan recently wrote in New York magazine: “I
don’t believe it’s disputable at this point that the most potent
issue behind the rise of the far right in America and Europe
is mass immigration. It’s a core reason that Trump is now
president.” He called the Democrats’ sudden decision to
treat illegal immigrants as a beloved constituency “political
suicide.”
Then this week, former Obama administration official
Steven Rattner called on Democrats to abandon liberal
shibboleths and focus on winning the votes of “white working-
class men.” Wage stagnation, he wrote in a New York Times
op-ed, is “our most pressing economic challenge.”
And of course, several months ago, the Democrats’
meticulous pollster, Stanley Greenberg, produced a report
telling Democrats that, to beat Trump, they need to win back
“the nation’s working class communities, starting in the
formerly industrial states and Upper Midwest.”
What does a laid-off steelworker, his town drowning in
Mexican heroin, think when he reads daily headlines like
these:
“Trump Suggests Bigger U.S. Role in Syria Conflict”
“U.S. Warship Approaches an Island Claimed by China”
Gosh, I’m glad we elected Trump! I haven’t been able to
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Steve and Cokie Roberts
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Armstrong, Mark J. Gainesville Daily Register (Gainesville, Tex.), Vol. 128, No. 42, Ed. 1 Friday, October 27, 2017, newspaper, October 27, 2017; Gainesville, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1324090/m1/4/?q=%22%22~1: accessed July 16, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Cooke County Library.